Coming of Age as a Poet

"Brilliant...full of perceptions and rewards that send one scurrying back to the text." --John Bayley, New York Review of Books The finest reader of her generation retraces four great poets' first steps across the threshold of genius. To find a personal style is, for a writer, to become an adult; and to write one's first "perfect" poem--a poem that wholly and successfully embodies that style--is to come of age as a poet.